CEO Pay Up, Average Worker Not so Much

Disney’s Robert Iger got a 45% bigger bonus in 2010 (Phil McCarten/Reuters)

Executives in the corner office now make 62 times more than the average worker, and that’s just in bonuses alone.

A study done for the Wall Street Journal, found that incentive pay for the chief executive officers of 50 major corporations  jumped 30% in 2010. That’s on top of their base pay. And it also doesn’t include a whole bunch of other things, like generous retirement packages, gold-plated healthcare plans and use of the corporate jets. Remember how the financial crisis was supposed to wipe away the bonus culture of pay for short-term performance in corporate America. Yes. Well, not so much.

The revolt of the lower upper class begins

Back in 2006, Matt Miller wrote a column for Fortune that seemed very clever to me at the time and now is looking downright prescient. The gist of it: Here’s my outlandish theory: that economic resentment at the bottom of the top 1 percent of America’s income distribution is the new wild card in public [...]